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Carson, Rachel Louise (27 May
1907-14 Apr. 1964), writer and
scientist, was born in Springdale,
Pennsylvania, the daughter of
Robert Warden Carson, a salesman,
and Maria Frazier McLean, a
teacher. Her father was never
successfully employed. He sold real
estate and insurance and worked for
the local public utility company.
Her mother, who had had the
benefit of a fine education at the
Washington Female Seminary, was
an avid naturalist and passed on her
deep respect for the natural world
and her love of literature to her daughter. Mother and daughter, who never married,
lived together almost continuously until Maria Carson died in 1958.
As a child, Carson read and wrote stories about birds and other woodland creatures
that she and her mother encountered on their frequent outdoor excursions. She won
the first of several literary prizes at age ten for a story published in St. Nicholas
Magazine. By the time she graduated from high school she was a skilled naturalist
and a student with recognized literary talent.
In 1925 Carson entered Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in
Pittsburgh as a scholarship student. She was a reserved but self-confident English
major whose social life was limited by her impecuniousness, but she excelled
academically. A required course in biology given by Mary Scott Skinker, a brilliant
young zoology professor, inspired Carson to change her major to biology in her junior
year. Skinker had a profound impact on Carson, who modeled her life and career after
her teacher. Carson graduated magna cum laude in 1929 and won a place that summer
as "beginning investigator" at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she saw the ocean for the first time and embarked
upon a lifelong study of marine life. She won a small stipend for graduate work at
Johns Hopkins University, where she began a master's degree program in zoology in
the fall of 1929.
Carson was single-minded about preparing for a career in science at a time when very
few women could find professional positions. She consulted with established
scientists at Woods Hole and sought advice from Skinker, who sent her to biologist
Elmer Higgins, her future supervisor, at the Bureau of Fisheries. Carson completed an
M.A. in zoology in 1932 while teaching part-time at Johns Hopkins and at the
University of Maryland. Although she intended to continue graduate work, her
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Lear, Linda J. (1999) Carson, Rachel Louise. In, John A. Garraty, Mark C.
Carnes.American national biography. Oxford University Press.
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family's financial situation and the depression precluded it. When her father and older
sister died suddenly in 1935 and 1937, respectively, Carson became the sole support
of an extended family that included her mother and her sister's two young daughters.
Carson found a part-time job as an aide at the Commerce Department's Bureau of
Fisheries field office in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1935. She wrote radio scripts for a
series on marine life called "Romance under the Waters" and, to supplement her
government income, natural history features for the Baltimore Sunday Sun Magazine.
The following year she entered the federal service as a junior aquatic biologist after
placing first on the women's register. At that time she was one of two female
professionals at the bureau, which in 1939 was combined with the U.S. "Biological
Survey to create the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Carson worked her way up the bureaucratic ladder as a science writer and editor
rather than a field biologist. Higgins encouraged her to submit an essay she had
written for government publication to the Atlantic Monthly, which published it in
1937. The essay, "Undersea," received critical notice and the interest of Quincy
Howe, an editor at Simon and Schuster who suggested that she expand it into a book.
Under the Sea- Wind appeared just before the outbreak of World War II in 1941. It was
hailed by such scientists as oceanographer William Beebe, but because of the war, it
sold poorly.
In 1946 Carson was promoted from the Office of Fishery Coordination to the Division
of Information where by 1949 she was the editor of all Fish and Wildlife Service
publications. She developed a series of pamphlets on the nation's refuge system called
"Conservation in Action." The four pamphlets Carson wrote herself are distinguished
by their scientific accuracy and sensitivity to ecological relationships. Carson's
editorial work demanded both wide-ranging knowledge and scientific breadth. It
required that she be familiar with the scientific background of every subject that came
across her desk. It also exposed her to a variety of field environments that she later
used in her writing. Carson was temperamentally suited to the routine of the federal
bureaucracy and enjoyed the collegial atmosphere. Her writing was encouraged in this
supportive environment, and her emotional and intellectual connection with nature
was given both an outlet and a framework.
Her increasing editorial responsibilities, however, dramatically slowed the pace of her
own writing. It took her a decade to produce her next and most popular sea book, The
Sea Around Us, published in 1951. One chapter, "The Birth of an Island," had
appeared earlier in the Yale Review and won Carson the George Westinghouse Science
Writing Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Sea
Around Us was serialized in the New Yorker, where it captivated scientists and the
public alike. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for a record eighty-six
weeks. Its success resulted in the reissue that same year of Under the Sea-Wind, which
also became a bestseller and contains some of her finest nature writing. There was
almost no precedent for a book of such scientific scholarship that was at once a lyrical
description of the wonders of nature and fine literature. Through Carson's synthesis of
the extant knowledge of marine life, readers became sensitive to the fragile
interdependence of life. Carson was awarded the John Burroughs Medal and the
National Book Award and was chosen "woman of the year in literature" by the
Associated Press. The Sea Around Us established Carson as the preeminent natural
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science writer of the day and won her international acclaim.
Royalties from The Sea Around Us enabled Carson to retire from government service
in 1952 and to build a cottage on the Sheepscot River in Maine, where she retreated to
work each summer. The last volume in the sea's biography, The Edge a/the Sea, was
completed in 1955 and like its predecessor was a bestseller. It contains her finest
poetic evocation of life along the shore as well as the delicate ecological balance
between sea and shore. Although it did not garner the record sales of The Sea Around
Us, it was the book she most enjoyed writing because she was able to work on it in
Maine, near her close friends Dorothy and Stan Freeman.
Carson was fascinated by the ocean and its mysteries as well as by the shoreline of
life between the sea and the land. Her nature writing enthralled millions of readers,
introducing them to the myriad of intricate interrelationships that were basic to the
science of ecology. Embedded within her writing was the view that human beings
were but one part of nature, distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some
cases irreversibly. Believing that science and literature were equal in their ability to
illuminate and inspire, Carson sought to educate the public about the natural world in
terms that, while scientifically accurate, also embodied the poetic truths she found in
nature.
Uncertain which of several projects to pursue next, Carson completed an important
article in 1956 on preserving a child's sense of wonder in nature, which was
posthumously published as The Sense a/Wonder (1965). She produced a television
script for the "Omnibus" series on clouds and ajuvenile edition of The Sea Around Us
and advocated the preservation of certain areas of seashore as wilderness in an essay
for Holiday magazine. Before her death, she leant her support to legislation for the
humane treatment of animals, particularly those used in scientific experiments. A
series of unforeseen events determined that Carson's next project would not continue
her mystical exploration of the natural world but warn of the potential for ecological
disaster as a result of the careless misuse of chemical pesticides.
Synthetic hydrocarbon pesticides, products of wartime technology, revolutionized
domestic agriculture in the 1950s because of their persistence and effectiveness. As a
Fish and Wildlife editor, Carson had been on the periphery of scientific debates over
the use of such chemicals as DDT, but her interest in pollutants and poisons began as
early as 1938. Her immediate attention to pesticide abuse was directed by a friend in
Duxbury, Massachusetts, who complained of the disastrous effects that DDT had had
on birds during a state mosquito control program and asked Carson for information.
Ever since 1945 when she tried unsuccessfully to interest Reader's Digest in
publishing an article on the potential hazards of DDT use, Carson had been following
the problem of pesticide pollution. Carson's research was assisted by material
collected as a result of a suit brought against the federal government's insect
eradication program on Long Island, New York, by concerned amateur scientists
Marjorie Spock, sister of Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Mary Richards and joined by
ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy. About the same time pesticides made political
news when the Department of Agriculture was publicly criticized for its ill-conceived
extermination campaign against the imported fire ant in the southeastern United
States, which resulted in much harm to wildlife and the water supply. Carson took part
in local conservation protests against the government program.
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Reluctantly concluding that no magazine would publish an article on such a
distasteful subject as pesticide pollution, she embarked on a book, originally proposed
to her Houghton Mifflin editor Paul Brooks as "The Control of Nature" in 1958. As
her research progressed, however, Carson came to believe that everything that meant
the most to her was being threatened by the careless use of these new chemicals.
Likening the effects of pesticides to those of atomic radiation, she became an
unabashed crusader for change in the government's policy of pesticide approval and
use. The result, Silent Spring (1962), was a powerful critique of the Cold War culture
that condoned such crude and short-sighted tampering with the natural world. The
book indicted the chemical industry, the government, and agribusiness for
indiscriminately using pesticides without knowing more about their long-term effects.
Once again serialized by the New Yorker in advance of publication, the book caused a
sensation. In clear, often beautiful prose Carson demonstrated that chemical pesticides
were potential biocides that threatened humankind and nature with extinction. She
used the impact of pesticides to illustrate that man, like other species, was a
vulnerable part of the earth's ecosystem.
Silent Spring and its author were immediately attacked by the scientific establishment
and the powerful agrichemical industry. Mounting a quarter-million-dollar publicity
campaign, the industry attacked her as an hysterical woman as well as a poor scientist
and accused her of needlessly alarming the public. Nonetheless, Silent Spring caught
the attention of President John F. Kennedy, who called for an investigation of the
issues it raised. The 1963 report of a special panel of the President's Science Advisory
Committee supported Carson's conclusions. Regulatory hearings by a U.S. Senate
subcommittee chaired by Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff at which Carson
testified followed. The public responded by calling for state and federal regulation of
pesticide control programs and the elimination of the use of some compounds. Carson
was acclaimed by the public and received numerous scientific and literary awards,
including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The writing of Silent Spring was also an act of extraordinary moral and physical
courage for Carson, who endured what she called a "catalogue of illnesses." Belatedly
diagnosed with a rapidly metastasizing breast cancer and suffering crippling arthritis,
throughout the four years of research and writing, she was uncertain she would live to
see her work completed. She died in Silver Spring, Maryland, just eighteen months
after its publication.
Carson's meticulous scientific research and her spiritual connection with nature
inspired a group of younger activists to demand that the government act to protect
human health and regulate activities that affect the environment. Her work also helped
expand the definition of environmental protection, and it encouraged conservation
organizations to embrace a broader ecological orientation that included wilderness,
habitat, and species preservation. Generally credited as being the fountainhead of the
environmental movement, Carson helped democratize science by challenging
scientists, government officials, and industry executives to understand the impact of
new technologies and by forcing the citizenry to become part of the growing debate
over technological advances of all kinds. She demonstrated that government had
failed to protect the public adequately and that new policies were necessary. Although
some of the research Carson used has been refined, her fears about chemical pollution
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were stated conservatively. Some chemicals have been banned from the United States,
yet more powerful ones have taken their place, and some that were banned have
returned to these shores via an agricultural import "cycle of poison." Americans still
struggle to heed her warnings, but her witness for the whole of nature has continued to
inspire later generations. Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
posthumously by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Bibliography
Carson's letters, papers, and holograph manuscripts are part of the Yale Collection of
American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The Lear/Carson Collection, which includes primary and secondary material,
photographs, college reminiscences, misceJlaneous reviews, newspaper clippings, oral
interviews, and a manuscript account of the Silent Spring controversy, as welJ as
primary material from related scientists and friends, is in the Department of Special
CoJlections, Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College.
Linda Lear's biography Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997) provides the fullest
account of Carson's life and work. A view of Carson's important friendship with
Dorothy Freeman comes from Martha Freeman, ed., Always Rachel: The Letters of
Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman (1995). Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of
Rachel Carson (1998), edited by Linda Lear, is an anthology including unpublished
work by Carson that updates material included in the still valuable Rachel Carson:
The Writer at Work (1998; a revised edition of The House ofLife [1972]) by Carson's
editor Paul Brooks. His chapter on Carson in his book Speaking for Nature (1983) is a
fine critique of her naturalist legacy. An ecocritical view of Carson's work is provided
by Cheryl Glotfelty in John Elder, ed., American Nature Writers (1996), which
expands upon themes in Carol Gartner's literary biography Rachel Carson (1993).
Frank Graham, Jr.'s Since Silent Spring (1970) remains a valuable summary of the
pesticide controversy. An important aspect of the controversy is conveyed by the
rhetorical analyses in Craig Waddell, ed., And No Birds Sing (2000). Yaakov Garb
writes about Carson's politics of nature in David Macauley, ed., Minding Nature: The
Philosophers ofEcology (1996). Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The
American Environmental Movement /962-1992 (1993), and Robert Gottlieb, Forcing
the Spring: The Transformation ofthe American Environmental Movement (1993),
variously evaluate Carson's role in the larger environmental movement. Lear's article
"Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring,''' Environmental History Review 17, no. 2 (Summer
1993): 23-48, puts Carson and the pesticide controversy in broader historical
perspective, as do essays by Lear and Edward o. Wilson in the 40th-anniversary
edition of Silent Spring (2002).
H. Patricia Hynes provides a feminist perspective on Carson's life and the controversy
in The Recurring Silent Spring (1989), as does Michael B. Smith in "Silence Miss
Carson!," Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 733-54. Vera Norwood argues for a
gendered reading of Carson's work in Madefrom This Earth (1993). Government and
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industryreactionis reevaluatedinG. Marco,R.Hollingsworth,and W.Durham,eds.,
Silent Spring Revisited (1987). LindaLeargivesan appraisalofthe federal scientific
community'sreactionto Silent Spring in "BombshellinBeltsville:TheUSDAand the
ChallengeofSilent Spring," Agricultural History 66, no. 2(Spring 1992): 151-70.
SandraSteingraber,Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the
Environment (1997),looksat Carsonas arole modeland an eco-heroas well as a
pioneerinthe managementofher breastcancertreatment,andEllenLeopold,A
Darker Ribbon: Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors in the Twentieth Century
(1999),examinesCarson'simportantrelationshipwith her physicianGeorgeCrileand
her fight againstcancer.
Two televisiondocumentariesare excellentsources.CBSReports, "TheSilentSpring
ofRachel Carson"(1%3),isan invaluabletool for understandingtheparticipants,and
the PBS "AmericanExperience"documentary "Rachel Carson'sSilentSpring"(1993)
containsimportantinterviewswith Carson'scolleaguesand critics.An obituaryisin
the New York TImes, 15Apr. 1964.
LindaJ. Lear
Online Resources
RachelCarsonPapers
http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xmI2html/beinecke.CARSON.con.html
Fromthe BeineckeRareBookand ManuscriptLibrary,a findingaid forthe
collectionofCarson'spapersheldthere.
TheLear/CarsonCollection
http://cameI2.conncoll.edu/is/info-resources/special-collections/learcarson.htm
Fromthe ShainLibrary,ConnecticutCollege,adescriptionofthe primaryand
secondarymaterialson Carsonheldthere;includeslinksto additionalsources
ofinformationon Carson.
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